Floating Island

This week, I created an entry on Wikipedia and lived to recount the experience.

To be honest, I’m utterly exhausted after travelling to India, getting sick and spending an insane amount of time putting together an entry on Hong Kong’s cultural policy. Hong Kong’s arts and culture scene is poorly represented in the wiki world, so I had to start from scratch.

During this experience, I didn’t really feel the drive and excitement of creating a new story that comes from doing journalism, nor did I feel the casual relaxation that comes with blogging. I was more like a careful researcher trying to avoid expressing a too blatant a point of view (wiki frowns on the POV), with my guard always up, as I’m hoping to avoid as much as possible the brutality of those wiki edit wars. Though I can totally see where the people Schiff describes are coming from– I already feel very protective about my work and would hate to see it get messed with. So far, only a minor edit has been made– a  kind soul has categorized the entry under Hong Kong culture.

In terms of where I see Wikipedia fitting in with what we have learned and read so far, it’s undoubtedly a valuable resource and also an unreliable one. I often turn to Wikipedia when I have no clue about a subject (the most recent examples being polio and crunk) but I can only trust the information as far as it provides a general guideline, or clue, so to speak. Afterwards, my thinking runs along the lines of, “well, Wikipedia says that crunk is … xyz” as opposed to thinking “crunk really is …xyz”

If I was looking for accuracy, I would probably prefer an Encyclopedia Brittanica, but that would require going to the library and flipping through pages. Usually I turn to Wikipedia just to satisfy some small curiousity on a topic that came up in the course of conversation, reading or television viewing. These are the kinds of subjects that don’t warrant the effort of going to the library, or even to my own bookshelves. So it’s not even trade off between accuracy and convenience, the choice is rather between ignorance and partial truths, and I disagree with Schiff’s characterization of this process as somehow embodying a “newly casual relationship to the truth.”

Which makes the Cohen piece on judicial citations to Wikipedia so baffling to me. Are the law clerks who write judicial opinions really being so lazy, as Professor Susstein surmises? Even if one can find relevant information on Wikipedia, it should be backed up with a confirmation from a more reliable source, especially before being cited in print. And if the lawyers start citing Wikipedia in court briefs, clients may well construe it as professional malpractice!

Wikipedia’s own standard is that every entry should have supporting references. However, due to the lack of staff/dedicated volunteers to enforce quality control, not every entry gets a full review for accuracy. As the responses to Carvin’s report on Middlebury pointed out, a good benchmark for more reliable entries is the inclusion of references and external links, and rather than banning Wikipedia from schools, students should be taught to develop the skills for evaluating, utilizing and improving the resource.